Languages

Appalachian Mountain Mama

I have the privilege of being a guest of a woman that I call my Mountain Mama, even though I only met her seven years ago. She was a child bride, having completed the fourth grade, when she moved into the mountains eight hundred miles from her home and family. She in now 93 years old. The youngest of her four children, a grandmother herself, is caring for Mountain Mama's oldest child, an eighty year old woman with Alzheimer's disease. Mountain Mama still lives alone caring for her own home, chickens, and a cat, after having been widowed forty years ago.

She apologizes to me whenever she asks me to do something to help her. I continue to remind her that there are professors being paid $100,000 in agricultural colleges to teach what she is teaching me for free. I wish that there was a way that we could put a monetary value on the many types of work and accompanying wisdom that women with families do and share every day.